Three views on the RAE Design and the computer. Archigram's invisible university

Abstract

My student years, 1961–67, exactly coincide with Archigram's first and best flourishing and, just as Jon Harris, in my Cambridge Architecture year, was the Cambridge salesman for the first issue of Private Eye, I was the Cambridge salesman for the first issue of Archigram. From this contemporary though partial viewpoint, Simon Sadler's article arq 6/3, pp247–255) seems historically convincing. I might, though, nuance the emphasis on Archigram ‘cultivating the anti-establishment reputation of 1960s youth’ and ‘an ill-tempered generation gap in early 1960s British architecture’. Most people, especially when young, proclaim themselves as outside the establishment tent, pissing in. So it's surely not noticeably ‘ironic’ that pre-War AA students did too. But there seems to me a world of difference between the soft ‘youthquake’ of early 1960s Britain (Quant, Bailey, the other Peter Cook, etc) and the leftist atmosphere of post-1965, the delayed echo in Britain of America's Vietnam and Civil Rights struggles. The first ethos – aesthetic, chirpy, self-mocking, and largely apolitical – nurtured the surrealist technophilia of Archigram's most interesting projects. The second, which really was ill-tempered and anti-establishment, made Archigram seem irrelevant or worse, as the article points out.